Welcome to Stars Hollow: Gilmore Girls, The Complete First Season

Welcome to Stars Hollow, Connecticut, a small fictional town located somewhere near real-life Hartford. It's the town where Lorelai Gilmore, age 32, lives with her daughter Rory Gilmore, age 16.

The Gilmore Girls, starring the lovely and talented Lauren Graham as Lorelai and promising young actress Alexis Bledel as Rory, began airing on the WB in 2000. Recently I’ve had a chance to look back with fond nostalgia on the whole wonderful first season on DVD.

"The Gilmore Girls" are the town darlings. The show makes a big deal, from the first scene of the pilot, of playing up the fact that Lorelai is extremely youthful, more like an older sister than a mother to her daughter. Even the title highlights that the two share a girlish relationship, sometimes more like best friends than mother/daughter, though we learn throughout the first season how that can become a creative balancing act now that Rory is and heading into deeper waters emotionally.

Part of what made the show interesting from the start was this creative tension between friendship and mother/daughter relationship. Lorelai, who got pregnant when she was 16 herself and who has always been a single parent, admittedly sometimes doesn't know when she should be a "buddy" and when she needs to be a "mom." To make things even more interesting, Rory can sometimes exhibit more emotional maturity than her mother (at least at this stage of the game).

Four Delightful Locales

In this first season, the show does a terrific job of introducing the main characters (and delightfully off-beat minor players). We learn to care about them and to enjoy the comedy and drama of their lives. The main action rotates around four different locales, each with its own lovable cast (though various cast members cross locales) and each involving life lessons for Rory and Lorelai.

Stars Hollow is where it all starts. Lorelai and Rory live in a rambling blue house next door to kooky and kind-hearted Babette (Sally Struthers) and her jazz-loving husband Morey (Ted Rooney). The Gilmore Girls don’t like to cook, so they order lots of pizza and Chinese take-out. But their restaurant of preference, and where they both go daily to drink gallons of coffee, is Luke’s Diner owned by curmudgeonly, baseball-cap wearing Luke Danes (Scott Paterson). Despite his cranky reputation, Luke is a real softie underneath and it’s hard for him not to wear his heart on his sleeve when it comes to Lorelai. Their obvious but awkward and never fully expressed attraction makes season one romantically charged as well as fun. (Luke was my favorite character, and this early on it’s so painfully clear that he and Lorelai are soul-mates that it’s hard not to go on a tirade here and blame the writers for subsequent seasons where they mess up both Luke’s character and this blossoming relationship. Look, I’m refraining!)

Stars Hollow is peppered with other interesting townies, some utilized more than others in the first season. The vivacious Miss Patty (Liz Torres) as the town’s dance teacher with a passionate, dramatic past is one of the best realized. She and many of the other citizens have come to feel that they’ve have a hand in helping to raise Rory, since they’ve been a support network for Lorelai all these years. That makes for fun moments when they come to help celebrate Rory’s sweet 16th birthday, or when the whole town seems to turn against Dean (Jared Padalecki) Rory’s first boyfriend who breaks up with her mid-way through the season.

Also on the Stars Hollow scene is Rory’s best friend, Korean Lane Kim (Keiko Agena) my other favorite townie. Lane’s mother (Emily Kuroda) owns an antique shop and has old-fashioned ideas about how to raise her daughter. She has given Lane a strict, religious upbringing, very different from Rory’s raising, yet the two girls share a real bond. Lane respects her mother, but her great love of all things rock n’ roll has inspired her to stash the world’s largest CD collection underneath the floorboards of her room. Lane attends Star Hollows High with Dean, Rory’s aforementioned boyfriend. Dean is an outsider, having only recently moved to town from Chicago. He immediately falls for smart-girl Rory. Rory reciprocates his affection and the two of them become a couple, although Rory is now attending another school.

The school Rory attends is hoity-toity Chilton Academy, a prep school for rich kids. Rory’s not rich, but she comes from blueblood stock and is thrilled to get into Chilton because she desperately needs the academic challenge. Although she loves junk food and movies and can make dazzling pop cultural references almost as quickly as her Mom (though no one can out-talk the lightning-tongued Lauren Graham) Rory is a bookworm at heart. She never goes anywhere without a book and it’s the desire of her heart to attend Harvard someday. In the pilot episode, she and her mother are excited to discover that Rory, in her sophomore year, has finally made it off Chilton’s waiting list.

Chilton is a whole new world for Rory, and though she thrives on the academics, she’s not sure what to make of the snobby kids. Her nemesis Paris Geller (played with morose sarcasm by the very talented Liza Weil) and pretty-boy Tristin (Chad Michael Murray) both make life there interesting every day, as does handsome Mr. Medina (Scott Cohen) her English teacher, who ends up dating Lorelai for most of this season.

The only way Lorelai can afford to send Rory to Chilton is to beg her parents for assistance. This is hard because Emily and Richard Gilmore (played by the amazing Kelly Bishop and Edward Hermann) love to say "I told you so." The elder Gilmores are rich and swanky socialites who have never gotten over how their talented, bright daughter got pregnant and dropped out of school and their lives instead of treading the path they’d set out for her (cotillion, debutante ball, ivy league school). Lorelai has stayed out of their lives except for a few obligatory times per year, but feels she has no choice but to borrow the money for Rory’s tuition. Emily uses this situation to her advantage (as she does everything else) by insisting that in return Lorelai allow them back into her life...and into Rory’s. Lorelai agrees to this emotional blackmail and to an arranged Friday night dinner at the Gilmore Mansion, where she and Rory eat lots of fancy food and listen to Emily yell at the maids. The Friday night dinners are wonderfully charged and in many ways the heart of the show since they highlight the tensions between the generations, and the four actors work off each other brilliantly every time. Richard and Rory, much to Lorelai’s chagrin (and also jealousy) actually hit it off famously.

The other big season one locale is The Independence Inn, a local hotel. Lorelai is the manager of this very nice inn, having worked her way up from the job she took there as a maid when Rory was little. Her closest pal Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy) is the master chef. Sookie is a clumsy, somewhat ditzy redhead with a heart of gold. She may lack grace, but her souffles (and everything else she cooks) are always perfect. In season one, she loses her heart to her vegetable supplier, Jackson (Jackson Douglas) which at least ensures that inn will always have high quality produce! We also meet snooty front desk clerk Michel (Yanic Truesdale) whose French accent overlays dripping sarcasm. The accent makes him very hard to understand. He’s hysterically funny, however; with the advantage of watching these episodes on DVD you can always play Michel’s scenes again in order to catch every funny word!

Over-the-Top, but Filled With Heart

There is nothing realistic about The Gilmore Girls: beginning with the fact that no two women who ate that much junk food could ever stay that thin. Nor could anyone ever manage to consistently come up with as many terrific one-liners as Lorelai Gilmore does on a daily basis. Then there’s the quaint and sometimes absurd antics and banter of the townspeople. This show screams "fiction!" and never lets you forget that it’s scripted, though the lines are delivered with such zest, energy and talent that you don’t mind stepping onto the bus to Stars Hollow and going along for the ride.

But for all its "scriptedness," the emotions feel real. The characters have heart and the actors make you feel their triumphs, bittersweet moments, and occasional agonies, even if their situations are comically dramatic, drawn bigger than real-life. Some of my favorite moments come in the small glances between people, the meaningful silences between the witty banter, and the almost-embraces. Original series writers Amy Sherman and Daniel Palladino had a great thing going when they started. Now limping along with other writers in its seventh season, Gilmore Girls long ago "jumped the shark" (as they say in television parlance) and yet I still sometimes have my sister tape new episodes for me because I miss the early days when no sharks were in sight.

If you’re a fan of The Gilmore Girls, the six-disc season one DVD is probably the one you’ll want to watch again and again. There are some nice extra features, including interviews with the Palladinos and most of the main actors regarding the show’s creation. (No startling insights, but it’s fun to hear Amy Sherman-Palladino admit that they’ve crammed so much dialogue into the show that most shooting scripts run 20-25 pages longer than most hour-long shows. I knew it!)

But most of all there are twenty-one great episodes. You’ll enjoy the re-introduction to characters you quickly came to love, and you’ll rejoice in the innocent feeling of the beginning of this series, especially Rory’s wide-eyed, bookish naivete and zest. If you’ve never seen the show, and you’re a fan of well-written and well-acted comedy/drama, you’ll love seeing this and perhaps the next two seasons. I know I’ve loved going back to visit Stars Hollow!

~befus, 2007


For die-hard fans: here’s a handful of my favorite season one moments.

Dean kisses Rory for the first time, in an aisle at Doose’s Supermarket. Rory stares at him wide-eyed, bleats out "thank you!" and dashes across town to breathlessly inform Lane that she’s been kissed...and that she’s accidentally shoplifted a box of corn starch.

Lorelai comes home to realize that Stella, the baby chick that Rory is supposed to be studying for her science class, has gotten out of its cage. She stands in the living room, looking panicked, and shouts "STELLA!" a la Marlon Brando in "A Street Car Named Desire."

The morning after Dean breaks up with Rory, he tries to come into Luke’s for coffee. Luke, all in a huff, comes out to inform him that he will no longer be served here. Dean is adamant about coming in, and the two of them get into a head-locked slap-fight which we viewers get to watch through the plate glass window of the diner while Rory and Lorelai sit chatting, oblivious at first to what’s happening on the sidewalk.

At 4:03 am on the morning of Rory’s birthday, Lorelai comes into her room, crawls into bed next to her, and regales her with the harrowing tale of her birth. It’s clearly a family tradition, as the bleary-eyed Rory chimes in to finish her mother’s sentences.

Lane meets Henry, a handsome young Korean student, at a Chilton party she attends with Rory. She falls for him immediately, then panics because he’s exactly the kind of boy her mother wants her to date. "I can’t believe I just gave my number to a potential Korean doctor."

Emily insists on coming over to see Rory off for her first school dance. She assumes the beautiful dress is storebought, but when Lorelai informs her usually sniping mother that it’s homemade, Emily for once is able to say something kind. She tells her she did a beautiful job with the dress...and with Rory.